Borrowed Spaces: the project
Borrowed Spaces (2014-) is an ongoing, cyclic exploration of depth by multi-media artist Panca Evenblij (1972). Culminating in diverse series of large-scale photographs printed on drawing paper, the project’s title encompasses an eight-part artistic process of collection and contraction which searches for spatial expanses within thousands of photographs taken over seven years of a single graffiti wall in Amsterdam.
Evenblij took these photographs, or ‘snapshots’, as the artist calls them, in extremely close proximity to the wall – lying on the floor or pressed against its sides – for several hours a day, four days a week, while the wall underwent drastic changes through changing weather and passing graffiti artists at least three times a week. In 2020 she published a collection of these photographs in a book entitled Borrowed Spaces. The title was an adaptation of something a fellow draughtsman had observed: “you create the drawings, but they’re made from borrowed images.” The name stuck, and has grown to embrace the entire project.
Likewise, Evenblij took hundreds of wall fragments back to her studio, which she saw as “paintings in themselves”: their torn edges, serpentine lines, and blended textures resembled her drawings, and she began positioning the fragments with her drawings to be photographed together.
These snapshots, of both the wall, her drawings and the fragments, are then inserted into a “generative adversarial network”, an artificial intelligence program designed by former medical researcher and IT specialist Albert de Roos, which learns to generate new images resembling the input images. The program searches for lines and reconstructs them, loses them or moves them in an effort to create its own image, producing dozens or hundreds of interpretations of each snapshot. For Evenblij, the program’s process of repetitively and scrupulously investigating space, mirrors her own practice as a painter. “Earlier, when I painted and I felt that it still wasn’t right, instead of painting over it I would start painting again alongside of it, painting one work after the other until it felt right. What the AI does is my own process, but then ten or a hundred times faster, with more varied outcomes.”
In the AI’s quest to replicate the jagged contours and stark contrasts of Evenblij’s snapshots, lines are often blurred, or lost altogether. Vivid or opaque colors soften into translucent and cool tones. Textures of cement and old paint are aqueously blended, culminating in an experience of depth one might find staring at the surface of a clear sea, rocks meters beneath feeling just out of reach. Often serialized with the title Lines & Lost Lines, these works reenter Evenblij’s pursuit of freedom through depth by being drawn upon by hand and reinserted for the AI’s consideration, producing a new series in a limitless expanse of space resulting from an obsessive, enduring investigation of detail.
